There’s an app for every phone, tablet, PC, and browser to bring you closer to the Facebook ecosystem and become more reliant on the associated services. Facebook have even completely changed the way we shop, sell, and trade.

Facebook Marketplace is a relatively new addition that brings customers and sellers even closer than ever before.

There’s another benefit too… possibly an even bigger one: Facebook always prioritizes the visibility of their new features across their apps and websites.

This is an amazing situation for sellers to be in, because Facebook is basically giving away free traffic to ensure that people get used to the Marketplace and adopt it into their everyday lives. Marketplace boasts over 550 million visitors every month, over 18 million listed items every month, and over 77% growth rate since release. It’s huge, and it’s getting huger.

Learn About It

You need to keep up to date with what's going on in the industry, but you have a ton to do - I get it. Trust me, this is worth putting the brakes on for. Facebook Marketplace offers such immense opportunity for growth that it would be foolish to avoid it due to time spend concerns. I’ll show you what it’s all about and point you in the right direction, but you’ll always have to do the work and refine your approach until you hit your sweet spot.

What Marketplace is, is a buying and selling section added to Facebook’s app. It makes transacting easy and informative across the board. It borrows cues from Craigslist, Gumtree, and other traditional trading websites. The benefit here is, that if you have a Facebook account, you already have access to the Marketplace. You don’t have to create a new profile to start interacting. It’s a P2P platform for now but is opening up steadily to fully incorporate ads and more.

How It Works

The Facebook app is famous for being easy to use and the Marketplace is no different. Open your Facebook app, select the Marketplace icon at from the menu tab bar and start browsing items for sale near you. Choose a category, price range, or any number of relevant filters. When you’ve found something you’d like to buy, contacting the seller via Messenger is just a tap away.

Start Selling

When you’re ready to try selling something, click on “What Are You Selling?” to start inputting the details of your offer. Remember that you definitely need photos included - ads with no images get little to no attention. Add images, make them relevant, and make sure they look good!

You want people to be able to find your product or service with ease, so make sure you categorize your offering appropriately. This will help you reach the highest number of people possible. Add a title, description, and asking price - remembering to always be clear and transparent in your wording. Finally, add your location and indicate which of your communities you’d like to promote to.

Marketplace Business Hacks

Wanna know how you can get your business seen and heard on Facebook Marketplace? Read on - I have broken down the entire system into bits so you can gain a full understanding of how to use this golden resource to its fullest potential.

Free Stuff

You can’t go far wrong with an offer of “free stuff.” There’s a prominent filter button within the Marketplace that allows users to see only free offers. You’re going to take advantage of that prominence to boost your business and convert sales. Decide on what your free offer will be, and ask yourself some tough questions:

How much easier will this gift make someone’s life?

How much money will this gift save the recipient?

What goal am I hoping to achieve by giving this away for free?

What is this free gift costing me?

It’s vital to know the answers to these questions because your ideal scenario will always be to minimise your spend or time loss, while delivering a high level of value to the receiver. You can upsell and convert people to clients far easier when they have a taste of your quality and level of service. Remember to use the word “Free” as much as possible, including in the title of your post and use a $0 asking price. Boast about it. It’s a great offer!

Testing, Testing

You have to try different ads, posts, and content if you want to be the best. Using a testing approach allows you to learn what works and what doesn’t, while simultaneously increasing your footprint within the Marketplace. While Facebook haven’t added a dedicated function for testing purposes, we can just use the same old 4-axis variables that every seller uses for this purpose. Try variations of pricing, titles, images, and descriptions. Draw up a plan that includes one post per version of your ad, and put them up. Record the responses to these and you’ll have a great plan of attack for your next campaign based off of the successes and failures you experiences previously.

Photos Sell

Cheap, grainy, badly lit, unappealing photographs will kill your success. You need to realize that in order to play with the big dogs, you have to roll with them too. You need to compete with their level of quality. Can you honestly say that this is the space you’re in right now? You need to up your game and that starts with professionally shot images that display your product with the same crucial attention to detail adopted by leading brands. The old adage says “Fake it until you make it.” I’d like to challenge that and suggest that when it comes to photography, it’s best left to seasoned professionals. Your sales figures will be better off for it.

Locations Matter

Post your offer in different geographical locations to make sure you’re casting as wide a net as possible. Your buyers will see ads prioritized to their local area, so adding more ads for those areas will get more eyes on your offer. A simple way to do this is to open Google Maps and look at the areas listed surrounding your location. Include ads for these areas too, ensuring that you can deliver when someone buys.

Category Cramming

It’s rare for a product to be totally one-sided, or used in only one sector. Take advantage of the many applications for your product and post ads that appeal to buyers browsing those specific categories. Think of this as ensuring your web of intrigue extends as far as humanly possible.

Keyword Competition

Keywords are king. They are the well-connected cousin of the ecommerce world, allowing buyers to reach sellers based on the words they chose to describe their need. So why the hell wouldn’t you adopt the same approach for Facebook Marketplace? You can play with variables such as location-based keywords, use your view counts as deciding factors, or utilize a more random approach to see what sticks. Your title should contain all the keywords you care about, so make sure you chose them wisely.

DM Domination

This is where it gets a little scary for the more introverted salesperson, but stay with me - this will fix your life. Facebook Marketplace’s standard call to action (CTA) is to contact the seller, so make sure you have some great replies lined up. Don’t wing it - test it. Try variations to see what works the best and who responds well to different types of copy. Avoid being stuffy and formal - talk to these people like they are, well, people. I promise you, most of them are.

Promo FOMO

Do you hate missing out on stuff while everyone else has a great time reaping the benefits? So do your buyers. Help them truly experience the depth of their FOMO by supplying a time limited promotion code. They’ll jump faster than a startled rabbit. People love to get free stuff, discounts, and special deals. Look around your city and you won’t see a spare square mile without some kind of special deal on offer.

Turn To The Page

You need a Facebook page. Whether it’s for your business or your product or your service, having a place where people can review, contact you, and see your promotions is key. Get a page, grow your audience, and you will have the opportunity to ask your community of fans to share links that you want to promote. You need as many people as possible to visit your ad and interact with it. Ask everyone you know to help you out. Share the link far and wide to stay featured for longer.

Facebook Marketplace can be a major win for you, giving you the best opportunity to make even more money than before and revolutionize your sales process. Officially, it is not yet open to advertisers, but this is not a major issue when you follow the steps outlined above. Be your own best friend here, and think outside the box. Not only that, but have the courage to act on your convictions.

Trying and failing is going to give you a huge amount of knowledge and ensure that you become the authority on your audience. Test it out - it can’t hurt, and you’re sure to get hooked the more you delve deeper into it.